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To Push Or Not To Push?

“Sometimes, we are so busy giving our children all the things we did not have that we forget to give them all the good things that we had” - Anonymous

Nothing can be more apt that that statement. I have studied ten years of my schooling in eight different schools. Not because I was doing badly at school, but my father had a transferable job and we moved pretty often. I have had the opportunity to study in the best schools and meet a lot of people.

Each school had its own advantages. During those SUPW (Socially Useful Productive Work – though we used to refer to SUPW as Some Useful Periods Wasted) classes, I learnt carpentry in one school, litho-printing in another and Karate in another. You get to learn to adjust to different cultures fast and get to make friends fast.

Moving frequently had its disadvantages too. Every summer, I would study at least a few hours a day preparing for the entrance examination at the next school. I would get to meet a new set of classmates while still keeping in touch with those few who had become friends over the last year. In fact, I have had an opportunity to study with two of my old classmates from different schools again in a newer school.

I can honestly say that I am a better person because of all the moving. Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever be able to give the same kind of experience to my children. Contemplating on joining the Big Brother - Big Sister network, I wonder what I should be doing.

Right from when I was a kid, my parents have always been reinforcing the idea that education is the most important thing in a person’s life. They have always encouraged us to be the best we could. Imagine the odds of getting into a medical school when more than 100,000 students compete for 14 seats and you get in. All three of us children have been through those odds and we have come out successfully. My parents believed in rationing our television time, enforcing discipline when it comes to studies and making sure we do well in class. “Where there is a will, there is a way”, was our motto.

If you have watched those martial arts movies, you typically see a sensei push the student to his limits. The master would be shown sitting in a chair comfortable smoking his cigar and the student is doing push-ups with burning candles right under his chest.

Should I be such a sensei to my children? Should I push them hard till they achieve their best? Or should I be gentle and treat my children with kid-gloves. Should I tell them what is best for them or should I let the children decide what’s best for them?

I first asked myself these questions a few years ago when my cousin was at the cross roads of her life when she had to decide what she wanted to do with her life. My aunt, unlike my mom, believes in letting children decide what is best for them. My cousin has always been a very intelligent kid and right at a very young age, she proved herself to be an achiever. At the age of fourteen, she was the host of the International Children’s festival. At sixteen, she had joined a dot-com company and was writing reviews of new movies, books and happening places in town.

I had a tête-à-tête with her and I tried convincing her that she should look at Engineering, Law or Business School as a career as it was the right thing to do. I felt that with her intelligence and her go-getter attitude, she would excel at any of those fields. She surprised me by asking me this, “The right thing? By whose standards?” I had always been my cousin’s idol; but that day I realized that I wasn’t getting through her. She went ahead and did her bachelors in Mass Communications and is presently working as a journalist.

Should I have nudged her harder? Maybe if I had, she would now be enrolled in Harvard or Stanford solving Ramanujam’s equations. Well, who knows, she is better off doing what she is doing now and maybe she will earn a Booker Prize.

On the other extreme were two of my classmates in high school who were extremely competitive. They would never score less than 100% in both mathematics and physics. The whole school would wait to see who would beat the other. A few days before the Class X board examinations one of them buckled under the pressure and committed suicide. The other went on to top the school and got into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – one of the best Engineering colleges in the world. But as they say, success comes with a price tag! The last I heard of him, he had dropped out of IIT and was last seen distributing pamphlets of a religious cult to passengers in a railway station in Bombay.

To push or not to push? I still wonder!

:-? Neo